East River Pipe’s Nontrivial Things: Beach House

Stoutly refusing to record his passionate songs under anything less than his own terms (in his New Jersey home on a TASCAM MiniStudio), F.M. Cornog, under the name East River Pipe, has released seven albums since 1994 that can stand toe-to-toe with anything by your favorite indie rockers over the past 20 years. Although working full-time at the local Home Depot and raising a daughter with his wife may have curtailed Cornog’s recording time somewhat, the quality of the finished product remains unchanged. ERP’s latest, We Live In Rented Rooms (Merge), is further testimony to a man who refuses to play the rock-star game (form a band, tour, do photo shoots, etc.) and has come out the other side with a brilliant body of work—and with his soul intact. Cornog will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Q&A with him.

Cornog: Beach House‘s Teen Dream was my favorite album of 2010. [MAGNET agrees with you. —ed.] Ah, the hell with that: Teen Dream is my favorite album since André 3000’s The Love Below. Beach House really knows how to write a great song. And there are a lot of great songs here, all performed so beautifully and with such incredible restraint that at times this album seems utterly effortless. Listen to Alex Scally’s gorgeously spare guitar work on album opener “Zebra,” then fall in love with this ultra-talented duo, as Victoria Legrand sings, “Don’t I know you better than the rest?/All deception, all deception from you.”